Overview

Scrum is a framework for managing and Organizing work. The scrum framework is based on principles, a set of values and practices which provide the base to which a company would add its implementation of particular approaches and engineering practices in order to realize the scrum practices. The outcome would be a version of scrum which is specific and unique in order to for having a process that would work for us.

Scrum Roles

Scrum Development process would have one or more scrum teams. Each team has three key roles -

• Product Owner
• Scrum Master
• Development Team

Now, let us understand the Artifacts and activities performed in a Scrum Development process.

Scrum Activities

Below is the list of scrum activities -

Sprints

In Scrum, work would be performed in cycles or iterations up to 4 weeks known as Sprints. The work that is finished in each sprint must create some tangible value to the customer. Sprints are time boxed and so they will always have a fixed start date and end date. In general, all the sprints would have the same duration.

Sprint Planning

A product backlog would depict many months or weeks of work which is much more than can be completed in a short and single sprint. In order to determine the most important subset of product backlog items to build in the next sprint, the development team, scrum master and the Product owner to perform sprint planning.

During the sprint planning, the development team and the product owner would agree on a sprint goal which defines what the upcoming sprint is supposed to achieve. By using this goal, development team would review the product backlog and would determine the top priority items that the team has to accomplish in the next sprints while working on the sustainable pace.

To get confidence in what can be done, development teams would break down every targeted feature into a set of tasks. Collection of these tasks and product backlog items would form a second backlog known as Sprint backlog.

Sprint Execution

Once Sprint Planning is done and the content for the next sprint is accepted, the development team which is guided by the scrum master's training would perform all the task level work which is required to get the features "done". Team members would define their own task level work and would self-organize in their own way they feel would be the best to achieve the sprint goal.

Daily Scrum

Every day of the sprint, probably at the same time, the development team members would hold a time boxed daily scrum or daily stand up. An approach to perform daily scrum would have a scrum master facilitating and in which each team member would answer the below three questions -

1. What did I accomplish since the last daily scrum?
2. What do I plan to work on by the next daily scrum?
3. What are the obstacles or impediments that are preventing me from making progress?

So, everyone in the team would have an understanding on what is occurring. Daily scrum would be essential to help the development team to manage the flexible, fast flow of work within a sprint.

Done

In scrum, we would refer to the sprint output as a potentially shippable product increment which means that whatever the scrum team has accepted to do would be done according to the definition of "done".

Sprint Review

Adapt and Inspect activities are the two additional activities that would be performed. One is called the sprint review. The main objective of this activity would be to inspect and adapt the product that is going to be built. There would be a discussion between the participants which would include stakeholders, customers, sponsors, scrum team, etc. The focus of this discussion would be on reviewing the just completed features in the context of overall development effort.

Sprint Retrospective

This would be the Final meeting in the Sprint.The Scrum team would review what could be improved for future sprints and how they should be done.The character of the Scrum would dictate that no matter how good the scrum team is, there would always be an opportunity to improve and the Sprint Retrospective would give the team a dedicated time in order to identify,discuss and plan it. The entire Scrum team would take part including the Development team,the scrum master,and the product owner. The meeting should be a collective effort like Agile and Scrum processes.

The purpose of the Sprint Retrospective is to -

• Combine the learnings from the last Sprint, with regards to people, relationships, process, and tools.
• Identify the major items that went well and potential improvements.
• Creation of a plan for implementing improvements to increase product quality.